Mulenga Kapwepwe, founding father of the Girls’s Historical past Museum of Zambia posed a query in 2022 to a small group of youthful tech fans in Zambia: Can one thing known as “blockchain expertise” provide any new usefulness for the preservation of historical past? She had began a brand new initiative aimed toward digital humanities, and interesting with younger folks excited by expertise who would possibly need to apply their skills to the world of arts, tradition, and historical past. The group of builders, designers, and artists she was working with shared their enthusiasm for “web3”, and collectively they mentioned among the properties and options of blockchains. So she started to think about how they may apply it to a very difficult drawback for African Heritage: artifact repatriation.
Traditionally, many areas all over the world have seen their materials cultural heritage housed in European and American museums, elevating complicated questions on possession, historical past, and id. Within the African context, this concern is especially pronounced: an estimated 90% of Africa’s materials cultural heritage is now situated within the West, in line with the 2018 Sarr and Savoy report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics1. Whereas discussions round bodily repatriation have continued for years, geopolitical and logistical complexities usually make tangible steps towards decision troublesome.
The group had an thought: if the bodily repatriation of artifacts is just too certain up in geopolitical, cultural and logistical challenges, maybe it could be doable to create a digital solid of the artifacts as a viable different. By linking a digital artifact to its bodily authentic, this technique would possibly seize and evoke an identical connection to heritage, creativity, historical past, and the invaluable data and classes of the previous that museum patrons expertise in particular person, whereas additionally providing a brand new perspective on the bodily artifacts—forming modern methods to attach with cultural heritage. With the correct supporting expertise, African artifacts at present locked away in European and American museums might change into accessible to Africans whose ancestors took half in creating them.
Digital and augmented actuality expertise has superior sufficient to allow high-fidelity scans of bodily objects, permitting them to be displayed on screens, projectors, or VR goggles in a museum exhibition. Nonetheless, the scanned objects nonetheless want that important property of uniqueness with a purpose to have a significant sense of provenance related to the actual factor. If artifacts housed in distant museums might be scanned, minted, and exhibited as distinctive, provenance-verified digital gadgets, researchers, curators, and museum patrons might interact with the artifacts in new methods. Furthermore, social coordination round these digital artifacts might allow significant interactions, permitting communities and consultants to collectively handle, share, and analysis cultural heritage in new methods.
Think about ticket income from an exhibition on southern African masks in Brussels (or Paris, or London) straight benefiting communities in Lusaka (or Harare, or Pretoria)—communities with actual, tangible connections to the artifacts. For a lot of group members who could by no means have the chance to see the objects in particular person, this digital entry might enable them to contribute private recollections or distinctive cultural context that researchers and anthropologists could have by no means identified. Such contributions might assist “recontextualize” these artifacts, restoring that means and relevance to gadgets which have usually been displayed with out the voices and views of these most carefully related to them.
By way of the sparks of curiosity that started with this query, the crew laid the primary foundational blocks of a brand new strategy to cultural preservation: one which connects the heritage of the previous with the expertise of the current, bringing it to those that maintain it most expensive.
A Historical past Machine
Venkatesh Rao, in a chat titled “bloodcoin”, described blockchains as “a historical past expertise”. They supply a everlasting, accessible medium to inscribe historical past on a ledger that doesn’t fade or distort over time. This makes blockchains an preferrred software or expertise for museums and anthropologists. Blockchains additionally occur to be an environment friendly solution to enact “cash” and different techniques that operate as mediums of change, unit(s) of account, and retailer(s) of worth. These properties would possibly enable blockchains to change into a medium able to “injecting historical past” into information of worth and possession to protect and acknowledge narratives of historic money owed and reparations.
To discover this potential, Mulenga Kapwepwe, together with Thomas Gondwe, Nhyira Amofa-Sekyi, and Mario Jere, co-founded SummitShare. Collectively, they got down to develop modern, digital strategies to handle the complicated realities of historical past. SummitShare’s strategy emphasizes interactive, participatory, and academic experiences—bridging the previous with a digitally fluent viewers and offering significant connections to cultural heritage by way of fashionable expertise.
In the identical approach that the web radically remodeled how info spreads, blockchains would possibly rework how historical past is preserved, providing a type of temporal permanence. By creating digital representations of artifacts and inscribing their provenance — their journey by way of societies and time — SummitShare democratizes entry to cultural heritage. Many artifacts in European museums right now lack full provenance, however residing communities could maintain invaluable context (songs, tales, recollections) that might deepen understanding and restore that means. Digital casts of artifacts guarantee this context is preserved whereas additionally enabling heritage communities to share in the advantages these objects generate.
Proof of Idea: Origins with the WHMZ
By way of a collaboration facilitated by the Girls’s Historical past Museum of Zambia, the SummitShare crew engaged with the Swedish Ethnographic Museum to entry their catalog and digital repository of artifacts. This partnership supplied SummitShare with invaluable sources, together with entry to digital information containing provenance info and preliminary 3D casts of artifacts held within the Swedish museum’s assortment. Leveraging these sources, the crew started designing and modeling a 3D digital exhibit that includes artifacts with wealthy historic contexts from Zambia and southern Africa. Past the digital modeling, the venture additionally proposed tokenizing these artifacts to encode and protect their provenance, marking a big step towards the creation of a decentralized digital repository.
Growth and Development Underneath Ethereum’s Subsequent Billion Fellowship Program
In 2023, Mulenga (as lead of the SummitShare crew) joined the Ethereum Basis’s Subsequent Billion Fellowship Program, permitting them to refine the venture. The venture gained invaluable open-source contributions for sensible contract and preliminary subgraph design from a pseudonymous contributor, and from Hanan Haj Ahmed, a Palestinian designer, who contributed early work amidst important challenges in Gaza. Daniel Tembo, a talented 3D artist with a background in recreation design, serves because the architect of SummitShare’s digital realm, and crafted digital exhibition environments to convey artifacts to life in immersive digital format.
The Main Women Exhibit: A Mannequin for Digital and Bodily Collaboration
All through 2024, the SummitShare crew has ready for its inaugural exhibit, furthering analysis on native repatriation efforts and forming key partnerships, together with with the Octant Accelerator to scale the platform. This exhibit, titled Main Women, focuses on the lives and artifacts of six Zambian ladies—trailblazers from varied societal roles, similar to generals, political activists, and tribal leaders. These artifacts present distinctive historic insights and inspiration for contemporary society.
With SummitShare, museums and galleries can create exhibitions with each bodily and digital components, every related by way of sensible contracts. This enables for distinctive synergies, similar to ticket gross sales for European exhibitions supporting cultural applications in Africa, combining digital artifacts with tangible advantages for heritage communities.
An exhibit on SummitShare is not only a set of photos and fashions of artwork items or objects – they’re linked to a set of sensible contracts that present a novel tag to the article and permit it to be represented on the web of worth. With the SummitShare sensible contracts, we get the provenance and uniqueness wanted for that significant connection to a digital merchandise.
Furthermore, the platform additionally makes use of the identical set of contracts to handle ticket gross sales in addition to interactive options of the exhibit that relate to the digitized objects. Curation charges, proceeds, advantages, and the connection between them are all structured to return worth to all custodians of heritage and cultural worth, traditionally and geographically.
The Main Women exhibit holds a particular affiliation with Zambia’s Gwembe Valley group, highlighting the cultural origins of the artifacts. The objective is to make sure that the Gwembe Valley group straight advantages from the exhibit’s proceeds and engagement.
Earlier than launching this exhibit, the SummitShare crew met with Gwembe Valley leaders to grasp their preservation strategies, governance, and information-sharing practices, which knowledgeable how the platform integrates conventional governance into decision-making processes.
The Gwembe Valley’s assist extends to 150 communities inside their jurisdiction, providing an unbelievable alternative for SummitShare to achieve a broad, interconnected viewers.
Ahead-looking Historical past
SummitShare isn’t nearly African heritage, it’s about utilizing human coordination to resolve the worldwide concern of cultural disconnection. By inserting historical past and tradition onchain, we create an immutable file and a bridge between previous and current, preserving legacies whereas empowering heritage communities.
At its core, SummitShare focuses on provenance (info) and folks. These guiding ideas drive its mission to bridge gaps in entry, data, and illustration. This journey is considered one of analysis, experimentation, and the design of techniques that allow democratized entry to cultural…
